Over forty years ago, Vannevar Bush articulated his vision of a “Memex” machine: “associative indexing, … whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another” [Bush 45]. In the sixties, Engelbart [Engelbart, English 68] built collaborative systems to provide idea structuring and sharing. Nelson [Nelson 81] coined “hypertext” and proposed world-wide networks for publishing, linking, annotating and indexing multiple versions of documents. With increasing numbers of research projects, papers, panels and conferences, and commercially available systems (e.g. Notecards by Xerox, Guide by Owl and HyperCard by Apple) in recent years, hypertext may be an idea whose time has finally come — or at least a phenomenon not to be ignored.The goal of this panel is not to define hypertext or hypermedia (at its simplest: non-linearly arranged and accessed information), debate its uniqueness, explain implementation issues, or survey the many applications and contributions in the field (see [Conklin 87] for an excellent survey of Hypertext, and the Proceedings of Hypertext '87 Workshop at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill). Rather, we intend to approach it from the perspective of the information user: reader, searcher, author. The panel will address the following issues: Are the processes of authoring and understanding helped or hindered by the non-linear structure of hypertext, for which kinds of tasks and users? What is the difference between a hypertext writer and a knowledge engineer? In searching for information, what is the difference between browsing and querying?What experiments need to be done? What tools, environment or interfaces can improve the process of information creation and access? Can the overhead of creating or interpreting structure be reduced?When will hypertext replace paper, or should it? How do functions of author and reader co-evolve? Could this revolutionize society like the printing press? Why didn't the panelists create a multi-versioned, highly crossreferenced online entry for the proceedings? Is hypertext a technology in search of a problem?